Andy Reid faced a number of difficult calls on Sunday afternoon against the Pittsburgh Steelers. Here’s a closer look at several of them.
Football is a game involving over 150 plays and countless decisions. The Kansas City Chiefs loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday came down to around 10 plays and a few crucial decisions by Andy Reid. While those decisions didn’t pan out today, it’s good to see if they were the right ones or not.
One of the first tough decisions of the game for Reid came on the first drive of the second half. On third-and-one, quarterback Alex Smith took a QB sneak up the middle and disappeared into a pile of players. At first glance it looked like an easy first down as the referee from the Chiefs sideline ran into view marking the ball far enough for a first down. But, the referee from the far side of the field ran down marking the ball short of the first down. The crew went with the far side umpire and marked the ball a foot short of the yard to gain. CBS never showed a replay, so it’s hard to say which ref was right, or if the Chiefs should have challenged. Those plays are hard to challenge because the player gets lost in the pile and it’s almost impossible to verify where the ball is. For this reason I’m okay with not wasting a timeout and challenging the call.
But I am not okay with the Chiefs choosing to punt the ball away. I know the Chiefs were at their own 34-yard line, only down nine points and it was the first drive of the third quarter. Normally I would never say to go for it in that position, but in this game and given the scenario, it was time for it. This was a revenge game in front of one of the biggest crowds at Arrowhead in years and you’d been laying an egg all day. The team appeared timid and submissive the whole first half. This was a chance to say enough was enough and start taking control back as well as get the fans back in the game. Instead the Chiefs chose to punt and play the field position game.
It turned into a non-factor as the Steelers had to a punt on their next possession. However, it was a lost opportunity coming out of halftime to throw your weight around and tell your players and fans that the second half was not going to be like the first one. It’s telling everyone that this is a big game and you want to win it, not another regular season game that you want to try to keep close and maybe not lose.
The next decision is one that everyone is talking about around water coolers today: the decision to go for the touchdown instead of kicking the automatic field goal. The book says the Chiefs should have kicked the field goal. Start of the fourth quarter with a chance to bring the game to within one score, the answer in a vacuum is to kick the field goal. Yet this game was not played in a vacuum.
In this game, the Chiefs offense had not driven the team into Steelers territory the entire game. The only two times they had been on that side of the field had been on the free kick recovery and the Marcus Peters interception. In fact before that drive, the Chiefs only had 25 yards of total offense. By kicking the field goal, you are then saying you are okay with needing the offense to do something they had only done once all game. By going for it, that meant the Chiefs would only need to drive to the Steelers 35 or so. Again it’s only something they had done once, but it’s a fact that it’s easier to get to the 35 than it is to get to the end zone.
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Kicking the field goal is the mark of a team trying not to lose. Instead Reid chose to try and put his team in the best position to win the game by going for the touchdown. I completely agree with the choice because the reason the Chiefs have had playoff struggles for 25 years has been their prevalence to try not to lose. I like the mentality of going for the win.
Now what I didn’t like was the play call. It was fourth and two from the four yard line not fourth and goal. The empty backfield set with no motion allowed the Steelers to drop eight back in zone and force Smith into an uncomfortable throw. I would have liked them to line up in single back with Kareem Hunt behind Smith and Tyreek Hill running in motion. Alex could read the defense pre snap and if he sees stacked line he could check to pass with motion getting man defense confused. If the read is light front then could read the ends and either hand off to Hunt up the middle or Hill on the sweep. That formation gives you more options, which is what the Chiefs offense has been built on all season.
Of course in usual Chiefs fashion, even a bad play call was nearly successful and led to Reid’s last big decision of the game. Alex threw a laser in triple coverage to Demetrius Harris (who seems to be a magnet for late game big moment targets) that he caught for a second before it was ripped from his hands by Steelers strong safety Sean Davis. At first glance it appeared to be a great play by the defender on a gutsy throw and tough catch by Harris. But the replay showed it was a lot closer to being complete than it appeared in live action—close enough that Twitter blew up with fans demanding the Chiefs challenge. Even TV announcer Tony Romo said he thought it was worth a look.
Reid chose to not review the play and it was the right decision. Every week I see people who for some reason cannot understand the NFL catch rules. It’s not so much as people don’t understand the rule as it is they don’t like the rule so they choose to see it as they think the rule should be instead of what the rule is. Article three, item one states:
Item 1. Player Going to the Ground. A player is considered to be going to the ground if he does not remain upright long enough to demonstrate that he is clearly a runner. If a player goes to the ground in the act of catching a pass (with or without contact by an opponent), he must maintain control of the ball until after his initial contact with the ground, whether in the field of play or the end zone. If he loses control of the ball, and the ball touches the ground before he regains control, the pass is incomplete. If he regains control prior to the ball touching the ground, the pass is complete.
In plain English, that means if you are hit by a defender at the same time you are catching a ball than you must hold onto the ball through the entire process of the catch. An easy way to look at it is if you want to be given credit for a catch when hit by defender at same time of catch than you need to maintain possession until you had the ball to the referee. Harris did catch the ball and get two feet down, but since Davis was in the process of tackling him, he had to maintain possession of the ball all the way to the ground. This did not happen as Davis ripped the ball from his hands. There is a 100% chance had the Chiefs challenged this play it would have been confirmed and the Chiefs would have lost a timeout.
In a game as tight as this one you can’t give away timeouts on challenges you have no chance of winning. Reid has been criticized his entire career for wasting timeouts, so I will commend him for not wasting one here.
Speaking of timeouts, I did have one minor decision that Reid made which I did not like. I did not like the Chiefs head coach calling the timeout with 2:05 left in the fourth quarter. By calling that timeout, it allowed the Steelers to call a pass play without any repercussions. No matter what happened on that play the clock was going to stop after it.
Had Andy saved the timeout and let the clock run to the two minute warning than the Steelers would have had a tough decisions. Do they run the ball to force the Chiefs to use their second timeout, or do they go for the first down and throw it. If you throw it and fail to complete the pass, then the Chiefs have two timeouts and 1:50 to go. They probably still throw it and go for the win, but you at least make the decision harder.
If the play worked out the same, the Chiefs would have gotten the ball with around 1:45 left and 2 timeouts. Instead they got the ball with 1:50 left and only one timeout. It was a small thing and the clock didn’t matter much in the end, but it was a mistake that could have cost the Chiefs if they needed that timeout or if the Steelers had completed the pass.
This was almost a mirror of the 2016 playoff loss to the Steelers. The Chiefs defense got ran all over and looked bad, but in the end they Smith enough to win the game. Minus the one fluke play off Phillip Gaines’s helmet, the defense held the Steelers to only 10 points. The offense was bad and Alex was bad. He missed seven wide open receivers including three for easy touchdowns.
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Reid’s decisions did not lose this game, nor where they even factors in the loss. His playcalling wasn’t great, but his decisions where mostly correct—especially the decision to go for the touchdown. In 2016 Smith played to not lose the playoff game. On Sunday, he played to win. While it seems like a small thing, getting a conservative coach like Andy to coach to win the game could be the change the Chiefs need in January.